Wisdom Corner

The remarkable journey of Christine Beshar, currently senior counsel at Cravath’s (in the trusts and estates department).

In 1971, she became the firm’s first woman partner. However, she had never gone to law school; instead, she had begun her career as a secretary and a switchboard operator. Later on, through dedication and hard work, she “read up for the bar” and then passed the exam.

Kristina Gjerde is an expert on the legal aspects of marine conservation and is an advisor for the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Maritime law is a challenging area of the law: because no single jurisdiction nor central authority exists, this legal field consists of a patchwork of international treaties and national legislation, leaving many loopholes and unclear situations.

Michael Sandel, teaches political philosophy at Harvard and held this interesting talk about how to figure out what the right thing to do is, especially in tricky situations with contradictory parameters.

For example, if you had to choose between (1) killing one person to save the lives of five others and (2) doing nothing even though you knew that five people would die right before your eyes if you did nothing—what would you do? What would be the right thing to do?

As students stand up to defend their conflicting choices, it becomes clear that the assumptions behind our moral reasoning are often contradictory, and the question of what is right and what is wrong is not always black and white.

You have sent in a perfect resume and flawless cover letter listing all your paralegal credentials. You have been invited to an interview. You have researched the firm and have prepared brilliant responses to all tough interview questions you could think of. Then, the interview went well, but still you were not selected.

Thinking about these 5 body language factors brings to mind that, in a job interview, it's likely that your body language will have more of an impact on the interviewer than anything you say.

Alan Siegel, a branding expert and one of the leading authorities on business communication, wants to put plain English back into legal documents.

According to him, many documents are written in too complex "legalese" and many are simply too long. We all know that these are views that shared by many who do not work in the legal professions. In this video, he calls for a simple, sensible redesign of legal documents -- and a re-introduction of plain English -- to make legal paperwork intelligible for everyone again.

Elizabeth Gilbert talks about what we can do to nurture our own creativity. Fascinating insights into how to be more aware of one's own capabilities and how to help ourselves take full advantage of what is in us.

With Facebook going public late last week with much fanfare, one of the lesser mentioned facts was that Facebook is actually operationally managed by a woman, namely the company's COO Sheryl Sandberg.

We thought it would be interesting to hear from a successful woman like Sheryl Sandberg what she thinks about leadership and women. Her TED talk "Why We Have too Few Women Leaders" offers valuable insights.